In recent years, the use of mobile phones, “smartphones”, laptops and tablets for wireless communication of speech and data has grown immensely such that the demands for capacity, performance and flexibility in public cellular networks for radio access have increased dramatically to meet this growth. The capacity of a cellular radio network is dependent on a range of factors such as the number and size of cells, available radio bandwidth, usage of radio resources, configuration of hardware and software, and so forth. For example, small cells may be introduced in addition to a large macro cell to increase capacity locally in limited areas with dense traffic, hence referred to as “hot spots”. However, the need for capacity in certain areas may still go beyond the limits of the radio network resulting in unwanted latency as well as dropped or denied connections in the network.
A way of off-loading a public cellular radio network is to provide access points for so-called mobile or wireless broadband and “WiFi” at certain indoor and outdoor locations such as within a building inhabited or visited by terminal users. At such a location, one or more access points with antennas can be installed which are connected to a public fixed network e.g. via modems and routers. For example, the well-known technique of Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) is often used to provide mobile broadband and WiFi to terminal users present in certain limited and well-defined locations such as, a residence, a hotel, an airport, a shopping mall, an office, a building with several apartments, to mention a few examples.
One of the fundamental requirements for mobile backhaul networks connecting multiple user equipment is reliability. This brings up need for a link supervision solution to proactively and reactively monitor link status and quality. For wireline networks, such as copper connection and fiber lines, monitoring is performed using Copper Plant Manager and Fiber Plant Manager Tools. Now, because of the possibility to prolong a copper connection, e.g. Radio-over-Copper (RoCu) with fiber, using a Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) technique, with so called RoCu Reach Extension (RRE), which may be referred to as a Hybrid link, a solution for monitoring such hybrid links is needed.